


To Be Kept In Working Order

by Mirradin



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Captivity, Dark, F/F, Living Weapons, Military, Prisoners, Threats Toward Loved Ones, Unwilling Assassins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:28:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27306307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mirradin/pseuds/Mirradin
Summary: After Merrick takes his samples, the Guard get sent to his backers in the government. There are plenty of uses for unstoppable immortal soldiers, and one easy way to keep them under control: Just keep a couple of them back at base, and punish them if the others fail.After a successful mission, Andy discovers they’ve found someone else to use against her.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 2
Kudos: 48





	To Be Kept In Working Order

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on the Kinkmeme here: https://theoldguardkinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/1468.html?thread=206268#cmt206268

Andy walks up to the back door of the base fourteen days after she last walked out of it. She’s alone. Her handler for this one caught a bullet in the chaos around day twelve, and after that she had to improvise. She’s wearing a set of dark fatigues that don’t show the blood too much but do have a hole in the knee, a pair of badly-fitting second-hand boots, and the haft of the labrys balanced over her shoulder is cracked halfway down its length.  
  
She’s on time. She takes her victories where she can get them. They’re hard enough to come by, these days.  
  
There’s nobody around, except for a sniper in a tower a couple of hundred metres away, but after a couple of minutes the heavy metal door slides open. Andy walks inside.  
  
The base is an ancient concrete bunker from the Cold War, and the floor slopes downwards. The air is cold and damp, but her opinion matters less than a regular grunt’s does. Andy walks through two more pairs of more recently-installed doors, both automated, one fitted with an iris scanner and a fingerprint scanner, before she comes to a bare chamber lined with racks of weapons.  
  
A speaker crackles as she steps into the room. “Operative Andromache. Punctual as always.”  
  
“I didn’t feel like waiting around.” Andy swings the labrys down off her shoulder, catching it just under the blade to keep the crack from widening. She leaves it on a counter in the middle of the room. It’ll be repaired by the next time she has to go out, probably not by anyone she’d have chosen.  
  
“I take it that your mission was successful.”  
  
“I did what you asked,” Andy says flatly. Disrupting trade negotiations in a struggling country seeking to reduce its reliance on a wealthy trading partner by sourcing goods from other areas. Her deployers had other ideas. Not a job she’d have chosen. Not a job she would have taken at all, if her hand hadn’t been forced.  
  
Sixteen deaths. Five of them had never held a weapon in their lives.  
  
“Indeed.” It’s an unemotional response, but some of the tension goes out of Andy’s shoulders. This conversation will go in the log, which makes it an official acknowledgement of mission success. Official acknowledgment means command will hold up on their promise means nobody goes in the tank and Andy gets to see her family again, which is the only goddamned thing that matters these days.  
  
She steps away from the counter and walks over to the door set into the back wall, too far away from the weapons racks for her to grab one and go through before the camera spots her and locks her out. She wonders if Joe’s out of solitary yet. Nicky tends to be more diplomatic than Joe about refusing orders — he at least attempts to give Control a self-centred reason to do things a different way, whereas Joe will go straight to _killing children is evil and I won’t allow it, come up with something else_ — but that doesn’t make him any less stubborn, and it sure doesn’t make the consequences any lighter. They had Joe locked away for three weeks before a voice over the speaker in her cell woke her up at four in the morning and told her to get ready to leave. Things were easier back before Control figured out that little trick.  
  
The door unlocks. Andy walks through, into a narrow corridor lit by flickering fluorescent lights.  
  
Another speaker crackles overhead. “Turn left.”  
  
Getting to her quarters — and her team’s quarters — usually means going straight on. “I did what you asked.”  
  
The reply sounds almost bored. “Your performance was exemplary. Additional privileges have been granted.”  
  
Additional privileges like getting to take a hot shower, maybe. The only reward that matters is _getting to see her team_ , but refusing to put up with their bullshit isn’t going to make that happen any faster. She can jump through a few more hoops if she has to. Andy turns left.  
  
Speakers set into the ceiling every few metres direct her down a couple more short corridors until she’s standing outside a plain metal door with a small Plexiglass window set into it. “Inside,” the bored voice says, and falls silent as the speaker switches the microphone off. Andy wishes general equipment failure on him and pushes the door open.  
  
The room is a nondescript cell. Whitewashed walls, a sink in the corner, an empty bed against the back wall. She’s seen dozens like it.  
  
Someone is breathing in panicked whimpers, too fast and too high.  
  
Andy is across the room and on her knees by the bed before she has time to think about it. Damn them all and damn the locks, if someone’s tried sending Nile out on a honeypot mission again Andy is going to —  
  
It’s not Nile. The person under the bed is too short and too slim, skin too pale, limbs wasted away from lack of movement under loose cotton pyjamas. Her hair is longer and straighter, a loose, tangling mess around...  
  
Impossibly, undeniably, Quynh stares back at her across two feet of dusty linoleum.  
  
Andy’s breath comes out like she’s been punched in the stomach. “ _Quynh_.”  
  
She reaches out, but Quynh cringes away from her. Andy pulls back instantly. For all that she’s looking right at her, Quynh doesn’t seem to know her. Her beloved’s face is lost, her eyes unfocused and her mouth twisted in fear of some imminent threat; whatever she’s seeing, it’s not Andromache.  
  
They found her. They found her and then —  
  
She yanks herself away from the bed and faces the camera in the corner of the ceiling. There’ll be a microphone, there always is. “What did you _do_ to her?!”  
  
The speaker crackles with the same bored-sounding voice; Andy isn’t foolish enough to think it’s actually bored. Control must be _loving_ this. “We retrieved her from the seabed and provided her with clothing and a shower. If you are referring to her current state, it appears to be a result of her previous situation rather than anything that happened while she was in our custody.”  
  
Andy curls her hands into fists, but it tracks. This isn’t Control. Control would want her able to talk. This is what five hundred years of drowning has done to the woman she loves. This is what Andy has done.  
  
She lies back down on the dusty floor and puts her hand under the bed, not too close to Quynh, but where her beloved can reach it easily. “Quynh,” she says, falling instinctively into a language that no one else has spoken for a thousand years. “Quynh, love, it’s me. I’m here. I won’t let you be hurt again.”  
  
It seems like a long time before Quynh’s eyes slowly focus on her face, and a longer time before recognition flickers in their depths. Quynh’s lips move, forming a word with no breath behind it. _”Andromache.”_  
  
“It’s me,” Andy whispers. “It’s me. I’m here. I promise.”  
  
Slowly, like a frightened animal, Quynh’s hand creeps across the floor. Her eyes stay locked on Andy’s face, like she thinks Andy will vanish if she blinks. Her fingers brush Andy’s palm, too thin and too cold. There’s still a notch in her finger where she used to draw her bow.  
  
Then Quynh lets out a broken sob, and her fingers clamp down around Andy’s like she’s clinging to a rope in a storm. Andy grips back, not daring to let go. It’s still hard to believe that Quynh is really here, that Andy has her back, and now that she does she isn’t ever going to risk losing hold again.  
  
It takes time to coax Quynh out from under the bed. As soon as she comes she’s burrowing into Andy’s arms, clinging to her, burying her face in her shoulder. Andy yanks the blanket off the bed and wraps it around Quynh’s shoulders and then just holds her tight, curling up around her, making herself a shield between Quynh and the world.  
  
She can feel Quynh’s heartbeat against her chest. It’s like a piece of the world she hadn’t realised was missing.  
  
Eventually Quynh’s sobs stop. She’s still breathing too fast for Andy’s liking, but it doesn’t feel like she’ll fall apart if Andy lets go. Andy lifts her head and tucks her chin over Quynh’s head.  
  
“She’s coming with me,” she says without looking at the camera.  
  
“That won’t be possible.”  
  
“She needs to be with us.”  
  
“Official procedure —“  
  
“Is overridden,” a new voice says from the door.   
  
Andy’s arms tighten reflexively around Quynh, who clings harder to her. She didn’t hear the door open, too focused on Quynh. Foolish. She’s not sharp enough. They could have drugged her and taken Quynh while she was distracted.  
  
She stands up and draws Quynh to her feet, still wearing the grey Army blanket like a cloak. The newcomer is a man with an iron-grey moustache, wearing a colonel’s uniform like he’s used to it. There are four armed men surrounding him, all of them with their weapons aimed at her and Quynh. It would probably look ridiculous to anyone who didn’t know what she is.  
  
The colonel looks her in the face and smiles. It might be charming, if she was in any mood to be charmed. “In light of your effectiveness in the field, official procedure has been waived. Command would prefer her to make a full recovery.”  
  
“I’m sure you would,” Andy mutters. They would prefer Quynh to be _useful,_ he means, another undying weapon to unleash on this country’s enemies. Or its critics, or simply those it finds inconvenient. Quynh sobbing under a bed is not much use to them. But it means Quynh staying with the rest of them, _safe_ , surrounded by people who love her, so Andy can’t complain.  
  
She starts walking towards the door, guiding Quynh along. The colonel and his men back up to give her plenty of room. Outside, she turns to lead Quynh back to their quarters.  
  
“Operative Andromache,” the colonel says from behind her.  
  
Andy stops. “Yes?”  
  
“We can replicate the conditions under which she was found,” the colonel says calmly. “Quite easily.”  
  
Andy’s guts ice over. “No.”  
  
“It’s likely that doing so would cause extreme damage to her recovery. We would prefer to avoid it unless it becomes necessary.”  
  
Unless it becomes necessary.  
  
Unless Andy questions her orders. Unless she refuses to do as she’s told. Unless she becomes less effective as an army sent to smite the inconvenient and destroy everything they hold dear. Unless she gives them a goddamned _reason_.  
  
She could kill the man behind her, she knows with a bright and brittle clarity. Four soldiers with machine guns can’t hope to win against Andromache the fucking Scythian. She could have all of them dead on the ground in a couple of minutes if she had to, before the knockout gas from the vents could get to her.  
  
And then Quynh would wake up drowning.  
  
“I understand.”  
  
She does. She is sick with understanding. Understanding is a brand under her skin, the knowledge that this is where her conscience fails.  
  
They let her go after that. She shepherds Quynh back to the team’s quarters, through yet more doors that unlock themselves at someone else’s command. Quynh’s feet are bare and the bare concrete must be cold, but she wanders along without complaint, like she’s in a daze.  
  
It might be easier to take Quynh straight to her own cell, but Andy guides her to the common room they use when they’re allowed to spend time together. Nile and Joe (thank fuck, he’s out of solitary) are inside, bent over a card game. There’s no sign of Booker or Nicky.  
  
Joe jumps to his feet the moment he sees them, scattering cards everywhere. He comes hurrying towards them like he wants to sweep them both up in a hug, but he slows as he gets close enough to see Quynh’s face and she huddles into Andy’s side. “Quynh,” he says gently. “Sister.”  
  
“It took her a while to recognise me,” Andy says tiredly. “Give her time.” She peers at his face, lined with worry. “You aren’t surprised.”  
  
Joe shakes his head. “Nile dreamed her getting fished up a couple of nights ago. We hoped it was a trawler, but then, well.” He steps back. “Come on, we can get her on the sofa.”  
  
“There was a hook,” Nile tells her, once Quynh is curled up on the sofa with the blanket covering her feet. “They got it through one of the holes in the face and the coffin ripped open. It was mostly rust by then. Then there was a net.” She sighs. Her face is drawn. “I thought it was just a fishing boat, and then last night I dreamed the uniforms. And then Booker and Nicky got sent out this morning, before you came back.” She scrubs wearily at her eyes. “Is she gonna be okay?”  
  
Joe is talking softly to Quynh in the Sabir people spoke when he was still the age he appears to be. She hasn’t responded yet, but the last of the panic has drained from her eyes and her mouth. She seems comforted, in a way that is strange for Quynh, and stranger for Andy, who has known her since before people marked years the way they do now, and has never seen her like this.  
  
“I don’t know,” she answers honestly. “We have more time than most people, more time to recover, but what happened to her...” She stops. She looks Nile in the eye. “I’m not going to let it happen again.”  
  
“Of course you won’t,” Nile says, and Andy shakes her head.  
  
“They can put her in a tank,” she says, and closes her eyes. She can imagine it all too well. “They can do it for as long as they think they need to. I’m not going to let that happen, Nile. Quynh isn’t going to drown one more time because of me.”  
  
She sees the realisation in Nile’s eyes as she understands what Andy’s saying. What Andy’s willing to do, for Quynh. She expects it to be followed by horror, and it is, but instead of pulling away Nile swallows and squeezes her hands.  
  
“It’s not forever,” Nile tells her. “One day we’re gonna get out of here, and nobody will make us do anything like that again.”  
  
She’s right. It’s not forever. Andy has lived for thousands of years, and nothing lasts forever, except for her. One day this prison will fall, their jailers will die, and the six of them will walk free beneath the sky, beholden to no-one but themselves. Even Quynh’s coffin broke in the end. This will not last forever.  
  
But she thinks that for those she’ll be sent out against, it’s going to last far too long, all the same.


End file.
